Bandcamp is (was?) to music as Flickr is to photography. It's a portfolio site, that doubles as a means to buy things from that portfolio. It's the thing an artist's social media pages link to to say "here's my body of work for you to browse through." Where browsing through that portfolio — listening to 30-second previews of songs, etc — doesn't require signing up for any service, but is just a regular part of the public web.

Not 30 second previews of songs, in general: the whole song, often many times over.

Plus multiple download formats, including losslessly compressed formats such as FLAC.

Plus the best return to the musician of any similar platform.

I'm talking about what you get without having to sign in. Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first. The signed-in experience is mostly akin to the signed-in experience of the iTunes Store. It's what you get when not signed in that's unique.

That's incorrect. Bandcamp does not require sign-in for full preview, and you do not need to buy it either.

There are decisions that can be made by some artists, although I don't recall being offered "full preview requires signin" when I put my own album on BC.

>Even with free albums, IIRC you can't fully preview the song without "buying" it, which means signing in first.

Actually, you can! Fun fact, unless an artist/label has explicitly limited what you can listen to without having made a purchase, you can listen to most of the music on Bandcamp in full, without buying it, an unlimited number of times if you're not logged in. The way it works is that, if you're logged in, you get a set (~3?) number of listens before Bandcamp basically says, "Yo, you seem to dig this, you should prolly be a mensch and throw some dough to the artist(s)/label." If you're logged out, I'm not sure what the limit is (if there even is one?), but it's likely easily circumvented by clearing cache/cookies.

It's the same when not logged in, the playcount is stored in cookies yes.

Thanks! I'm usually logged in on all devices so it's been a while since I've tested it logged out.

Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was. You’re three dudes in your mid-thirties playing open mic night and passing a hat around, and definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify or Youtube Music, but you can get on bandcamp and a few people can pay $5 for a song they liked when they were tipsy.

Also YT Music quality is shit. I bought a new pair of headphones and though they were defective until I played some songs encoded by yours truly as opus files.

> Bandcamp let me pay a musician for a song, regardless of how unknown or unpopular a band was.

This is what made me love Bandcamp. I get to pay the artists more-or-less directly, and as a person who tends not to be into the Big Music Names, Bandcamp is utterly amazing, chock full of smaller artists doing wonderful things.

> definitely cannot afford to get on Spotify

How so? There aren't necessarily any upfront costs for getting on Spotify; several aggregators offer a "we take a cut of your earnings" model.

Even without a cut, there are several virtual distribution services like DistroKid and TuneCore which for a flat fee will take care of submitting whatever WAV one created to all streaming platforms. Getting it noticed is a whole other story.

Anyone can get on Spotify. See Distrokid for example.